Eric Leaver on the mill worker who became an ambassador for Lancashire's textile industry

THE audience of 3,000 people was supposed to be lost in community singing, but that night 50 years ago they were just too excited let themselves go.

Yet if the Northern Daily Telegraph's reporter noted that this part of the cabaret programme had fallen flat as the mill workers packing Blackburn's King George's Hall anxiously awaited the night's climax, it turned out there was every reason for the tension.

For, as the judges deliberated offstage and the community singing struggled on, the girl who everyone waited to be declared as winner of Blackburn's Textile Prosperity Queen contest was, in fact, destined to be a whole lot more.

Not only did pretty 16-year-old pirn winder Muriel Wilcock become the queen chosen to boost the town's cotton industry that year, she was actually on the way to being the girl who beat a staggering 50,000 others to the title of Britain's first - and only - Textile Queen.

It was an honour that was to take the blue-eyed teenage girl from Pioneer Mill - near home in Bonsall Street, Mill Hill - to dinners and receptions, fashion shows, department stores and factories, TV studios and radio stations, exhibitions and dockyards , the Houses of Parliament, the offices of government ministers, town halls and so much more nationwide in a unique reign that lasted 18 months .

The highlight was her own "week" In London - billed as 'Britain's Textile Queen Comes To Town' - and the upshot of her efforts were the thanks of a government deep in the dollar crisis of those austere post-war years and looking to the cotton mills to head the country's export drive aimed at relieving it. Stressing how much better pay, conditions and prospects were in the textile industry of 1949, the Ministry of Labour - using the slogan, "Britain's Bread Hangs By Lancashire's Thread," - headed the campaign to attract more workers to the labour-starved mills and for output to be boosted by new production methods.

And it was just five weeks after she beat the eight other finalists at Blackburn, who were winners of "district" heats involving scores of entrants, that Muriel became the personality girl chosen to boost the industry for the entire country.

Though she was the youngest of the 13 girls left in the contest that all those thousands had entered despite the title being virtually the only prize, it was the Blackburn lass who was acclaimed as Britain's first Textile Queen at Blackpool's Tower Circus in what the NDT described as a colourful ceremony.

Watching among the 4,000-strong crowd were her parents and 20-year-old boyfriend, Tom Ansbro, whom she was to marry two years later.

She was crowned by Barbara Castle, but the Blackburn MP was standing in for Harold Wilson, then the youthful President of the Board of Trade, but destined to become the Prime Minister who was to make Mrs Castle a Cabinet minister 15 years later. He had to cancel because he was busy dealing with the dollar crisis that Muriel was also destined to tackle.

And despite her tender years, she showed she was ready for the job. For, reported the NDT: "Showing remarkable charm and self-confidence in a girl so young, Muriel pledged herself to perform whatever job she might be called on to do to promote the welfare of the industry," the NDT reported. Wearing her crown and robes, she and her retinue of the 12 other finalists were driven off down the resort's promenade in decorated open coaches to take part in a parade at the Open-Air Baths - the first of so many functions that she was to preside at. The following month she was queen of her home town's Textile Properity Campaign Grand Pageant and Parade which included a two-mile-long procession of floats. Then came her big week in London - during which she stayed with Olga Mercer, head designer for Marks and Spencer and daughter of Pioneer Mill managing director Frank Mercer.

The hectic round of functions included visits to the theatre, an appearance on TV with top personality Sylvia Peters, an interview on the popular 'In Town Tonight' radio programme, press conferences, meetings with ministers and even being hoisted shoulder-high in a restaurant by members of the Burnley football team whom she watched beating Chelsea.

Throughout her reign, Muriel was under the wing of the government's Central Office of Information which fixed up functions that occupied her as Textile Queen for an average of two days a week - and wherever she went she was expected to make a speech while thousands of picture postcards of her were given out. "Although I was helped a little when I was chosen at first, I did my own speeches and each time I went somewhere I picked up a little more knowledge about textiles and I was able to make use of that," recalls Muriel, now a great-grandmother living at Feniscliffe Drive, Blackburn.

"I had a marvellous time, but there was always so much going on that I could not take it all in. It was hard work, too - but, yes, I like to think I did something to help the industry and the country at a time when it was needed."

Certainly, the government thought so - as in September, 1950, she was presented with a souvenir photograph album of her extended "year" of office and it included the signed thanks of Minister of Labour George Isaacs and trade chief Harold Wilson, especially for "the way you have helped to encourage recruits to join the industry."

Blackburn Council added its thanks - with a nest of tables.

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